1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally related to the field of software. The present invention is more specifically related to the field of management of information.
2. Description of the Related Art
Organizational charts have long been used to represent the relationships between people in an organization, such as a corporate entity or societal group. As technology has progressed, databases have been maintained with the information associated with organizational charts as part of the databases. Such databases have the advantages of not having a physical limit to the information stored therein, as long as the supporting technology can contain the database. As a result, databases may be used to store not just the names and relationships of people in an organization, but may also include much richer information about each member of an organization.
Furthermore, databases may be implemented to also store information about physical assets and other items an organization monitors. Databases may contain information on buildings used by an organization, phone numbers within an organization, locations of assets such as computers within an organization, and many other attributes. Note, for instance, that location of an asset may include its physical location, as well as its logical location within the control of a suborganization (such as a marketing or engineering department) within an organization.
One relatively recently available method for storage of information is use of a directory server and a lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP). A directory server stores data entries in name-value or attribute-value pairs. Utilizing LDAP, queries can be made of the directory server, thereby locating a set of data entries which match the query. As a result, the information often stored in databases may be stored in a medium accessible to a directory server, and queries may be used to access this information. However, the directory server does not feature the strong typing capabilities that databases do. As an example, a data entry intended to be a telephone number, named ‘phone’ and intended to store only numeric values, will store the value “four-one-five” just as easily as it will store “415” in a directory server. Likewise, a database may allow a restriction on the size of a field of characters, whereas the directory server may store the data as a string of ASCII characters, but not limit the length of the string.